{"id":89536,"date":"2025-11-08T01:00:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T09:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lenpenzo.com\/blog\/?p=89536"},"modified":"2025-11-13T08:30:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T16:30:13","slug":"black-coffee-8-nov-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lenpenzo.com\/blog\/id89536-black-coffee-8-nov-2025.html","title":{"rendered":"Black Coffee: Fish Head Soup"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It’s time to sit back, relax and enjoy a little joe …<\/em><\/p>\n

Welcome to another rousing edition of Black Coffee, your off-beat weekly round-up of what’s been going on in the world of money and personal finance.<\/p>\n

I hope everybody had an enjoyable week. Without further ado, let’s get right to this week’s commentary …<\/p>\n

The opposite of courage is not cowardice; it’s conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

— Jim Hightower<\/strong><\/p>\n

Credits and Debits<\/strong><\/p>\n

Debit:<\/strong><\/span> Did you see this? Last month, Jack in the Box divested Del Taco for $115 million, well short of the $575 million it paid for the chain less than four years ago. Now there\u2019s this: Yum Brands is considering the divesture<\/a> the struggling Pizza Hut chain \u2013 one-third of its fast-food triumvirate that also includes Taco Bell and KFC. The chain\u2019s share of the pizza market has shrunk from almost 23% in 2019 to 18.7% last year, and sales are still declining in 2025. Meanwhile, there’s breaking news\u00a0at the Golden Arches…<\/p>\n

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Debit:<\/strong><\/span> In other news, a recent study has determined that in order to return housing affordability to 2019 levels, one of three things has to happen: 1) home prices fall 38%; 2) household incomes rise 60%<\/a>; or mortgage rates drop to 2.35%. Amazingly, the study’s authors failed to identify the two most realistic solutions to the housing affordability problem: 1) sharply-higher mortgage rates that result in a housing market crash; and\/or 2) the long-overdue death of our fraudulent debt-based fiat monetary system. Until then, expect to keep seeing headlines like this<\/strong><\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Debit:<\/strong><\/span> Of course, when the government decides to live beyond its means and pay for its excessive expenditures via the printing press, rather than by increasing economic output, massively-higher bills for everything should be expected. Thus, here we are. In the meantime, we can only hope that the misguided monetary system “experts” who keep telling us that long-running large deficits are perfectly fine because “we owe it to ourselves” will finally figure out that there really isn’t<\/strong><\/em> any such thing as a free lunch<\/a>. Oh, and speaking of “experts” …<\/p>\n